Current Issues with Progression Traitor: Too many, low impactful objectives. Tedium, essentially. There is a sense of MMO-gameyness to it, which is absolutely a downgrade from before progression traitor. In addition, the objectives given are a lot less rewarding than the satisfaction of planning out a way to actually accomplish your objectives. The "easiness" of old traitor with its 2 objectives helped allow new players to settle in and experienced players to try and create creative plans. Yes, you can somewhat ignore secondary objectives now if you wanted, but all that says to me that the secondary objectives as it currently is is an inferior system. In addition, objectives vary wildly, and you're given a huge selection of 6 and can have 2 active at any time. This probably also doesn't help for the MMO-eyness, old traitor forced you to either ignore your objectives or challenges you with harder stuff if you happened to roll it. Progression traitor here gives you so many options that its very gamey. In comparison to Heretic, which generally you are stuck with the sacrifice targets you have as targets (most people don't reroll, unless they have to). Its a challenge and you must figure out how to kill all these people. New traitor is less so "Here's a challenge, good luck" unlike Heretic and more "Pick the easiest options and optimize doing them as trying to do hard objectives over and over again will get you deleted." There is a reason why Heretic just feels better, it did what Prog tot is trying to do right. And no, I'm not saying Prog tot should be the same as heretic, that's absurd, but its clear there's a problem. Prog tot does however, have advantages over traitor, and I agree it shouldn't be removed. A lot of the issues about variety of traitor objectives also comes from the fact too many are offered to you, there is variety but you don't feel it because of how many objectives you have to do.
So here's my suggestions about how to make traitor satisfying again:
- You can only set one objective at a time. On the other hand, reduce penalties overall for abandoning objectives, as its more likely you may be forced to abandon an objective now to balance things out. Simply put, single focus on a single goal. No micromanaging between multiple objectives.
- Potential objectives refresh and swap out after an objective completion (or perhaps also an objective abandoned). This will help fight the feeling of Prog tot being a checklist, running down and completing a list of smaller, insignificant objectives, instead getting new, more challenging but rewarding objectives instead.
- Either Remove the defined "Easy" objectives or alternatively force easy objectives for your first batch of objectives (Assuming you are a roundstart traitor, midrounds would still skip easy objectives), and then after one is completed, never make them appear again. Easy objectives should exist as a soft tell that "There is syndicate activity lurking aboard." They shouldn't be something you can grind, nor something you should be stuck with if you want.
- In addition to the above, consider making it so you can refresh objectives to swap out the current objectives you have offered, but at a significant cooldown (or perhaps, even a tc/rep cost). From my dated prog tot experience the refresh button did nothing but add new objectives to the list, and I might be misremembering so yeah.
- Scale the difficulty of objectives better so that there is more of a clear progression in terms of difficulty, as a rule of thumb, you should lose access to easier objectives in general as you gain more and more tc. You should really only be offered type of difficulty as you progress, but I suppose throwing one or two wild harder objectives occasionally above your rep level isn't a bad idea. This may sound bad, but it will help create a clear sense of progress and actual progression. The design goal is to be spending more time on less objectives, rather than being forced to spend less time on more objectives.
- Reduce the selection of objectives you can pick from. To about 4 instead of 6, to be exact. Not only will this allow for objectives to be cut from the codebase if uninteresting, but will also force players to choose to take on challenges of occasionally getting harder rolls of objectives that happen to be not convenient.
- In addition to above, Increase the rewards on all objectives. They're way too low, killing someone should be worth more than 2 TC and more reputation. The difficulty increase now is that you have less choice in picking your challenges, but in exchange you should be rewarded more. Before, objectives feel cheap due to low rewards and the wide variety of options. Now, we have strong challenges with less options to pick what's convenient for you. Therefore, you should be rewarded more for managing to go out of your way to create a story and engage with an objective not convenient to you. In addition, this will help with progtot objective checklisting mentalities and gameyness. The syndicate wants you do to a few specific things. You aren't here to have options, you are here to take on the challenge. And if you succeed, you will be rewarded greatly in both gaining harder objectives and a lot more TC.
- And finally, I had an idea inspired by Spy Party, to add a minute cooldown after completing an objective to both receive the TC reward and to select a new objective, something like "Good job agent, Processing the objective". Not only will this add a nice satisfying break from the action and time to appreciate your success, but also it adds minor encouragement to being able to escape from security or be undetected after succeeding your objective. Perhaps, something like the Final Objective might be exempted from this on the basis that there's not really much else to do from there anyways.
Edit: I guess this has both feedback and ideas for improvement? I forgot the ideas section is a thing but whatever, just move if its an issue.
